wishing on a star

and so it was bench watching the sun glaze the seine
dizzy with nervous energy this man this voice
unassuming letting the mic pick up the little notes
funny glissandi scales chord progressions interwoven
all his household fights dissipating into beatboxing wars
passing down his incredible lineage cultivating what they had
two rows between bodies into it singing along bopping delighted
long braids clasped behind his head lights creating a dense jungle
light touch of the accordeon player musicians at play
improvisational banter so simple and yet complex incredible ears
pure joy the glee of musical conversation spinning audible threads
imagining bobby mcferrin in the metro on the bus divining up
webs of sound melodies mind constantly humming i do pretty
well til after sundown my heart is still with you
midnight knows it too near the village the peaceful village
where troubles melt like lemon drops thats where you'll find me...

crusty bread, the smack of balsamic vinegar, and honey from the south.

the latter in a thin layer over a carton of yaourt nature (activia, danon, the green one). these are staples of my existence chez cheminal. shoutouts to those who have written me letters, i think i wrote more to you than you did to me. i've been getting writer's cramp lately, filling out neverending paperwork for the abroad program whose credits don't really count for much at oberlin except to say that i did something in paris and taking frantic notes in the cm section sur "les dynasties en inde" so as not to make an ass of myself when i decide it's a good idea to open my mouth and answer one of her questions that she so intimidatingly leaves suspended in the air for 10 or 15 seconds.

warning: the following text is french, because i'm having writer's block in english. ça arrive de temps en temps.

cet après-midi j'ai vu meredith benjamin, finalement, une camarade de cupa (pour manger un crêpe chocolat et prendre un café crème dans un petit café que nous aimons bien sur rue de rivoli et pour discuter la vie d'une parisienne) qui est maintenant en train de finir un dissert de 12 page parce qu'elle part demain à londres! et c'est un jour ferrier demain, alors il n'y a pas beaucoup de bibliothèques ni magasins qui sont ouverts - tant mieux si elle peut le finir ce soir. moi, franchement j'ai complètement peur de commencer mon dissert pour "le monde islamique," parce qu'il y a un article que j'ai trouvé dans le journal muqarnas de 1996 qui était écrit en anglais sur l'architecture de la mosquée à al-azhar. c'est mon sujet, mais il faut dire l'information 1) en français et 2) dans une autre manière. il faut que je trouve un autre traitement de l'histoire de la construction et la renovation de la mosquée, mais il n'y reste pas beaucoup de temps pour le faire...alors, il faut que je sois prudente, et que je ne ressasse pas trop sur ce que je vais laisser ici...

frolicking and trying not to panic

oola...maéva was crying tonight, i think she was absorbing some of my stress...my body is collapsing inward, not so much from the stress but from the utter lack of planning and the fact that the time is just evaporating. how is it that it is 1.15 am on may 15? perry j o'halloran blew his happy british swaggering self through town this weekend, really helped to clear my head but at the same time screw my head on straight. i have this little gnat buzzing in the back of my brain saying "wouldn't you just love love to stay in france, work at cité de la musique and do your doctorate in musicology with michel fischer whose name is so very close to that of a southeast asian history professor i had for a winter term advisor freshman year at oberlin? who did his doctoral thesis on polymodality in the music of messaien?"

...but i digress...he is in strasbourg, i am in the city trying to sweep out my brain of all the extra stressors and distractions. bnf was a success this afternoon, and if the stars are aligned i will wake up, get the right score to xerox from michelet, print everything out, and make it to the sorbonne by 11 am.

see you at the finish line! prance, prance, prance.

bull castration

i added a sticker to my small grey nalgene: a spanish bull, apparently, bought by the roman amphitheatre in arles (provence). the weekend with my parents was fun, if stressful, and yes, i can read a map, quite well actually, even if i'm nul at determining distances.

i saw these pinchers that castrate the bulls, also - ouch, poor things.

suny-purchase next year for my masters with tara helen o'connor (anyone familiar with dawn upshaw's golijov disque "ayre"? she plays on it with the andalusian dogs). i will find people to sing with, and maybe even will get to play with gulia and clio (they'll both be in the city) and frolick the streets with katherine cohn, my longtime something of a soulmate.

jonathan from québec is coming to paris this weekend, as is my friend perry from london from french woods! hooray! i think some good chinese food grâce à ching-min is in order for a group of 5 on saturday...

more soon...plagued by work and thoughts of not leaving...

bites

information may be withheld from this post to protect the identities of those involved.

friday was the scene of something spectacular. bevin turned 21, and scared iván away with her girls' night party (we went to 2 bars and everyone got home safely [mostly] by noctilien).

i saw some dolce&gabbana pocahantas couture, and my oberlin pc-ass was offended. i immediately thought of the fact that they were profiting from the objectification of a culture, but then...so did disney.

i have a rather shadowy dark photo of the two phallic symbols of paris (concorde, eiffel).

donatoni was baaaddddd. not enough rhythmic integrity. i am constantly tempted to spell rhythm "rythme" because that's how the french do it.

after jolivet's "chant de linos" what was on the menu? boulez's sonatine for flute and piano. i haven't played it (yet) but i saw cantin do it at palais garnier with pierre-yves artaud. is that his name? the pianist, whatever his name is, the famous one that recorded with susan graham.

my mom lost her purse in the park by cité universitaire the day of iván's concert. i went to the concert, they went to the police and to the hotel to cancel credit cards and put a hold on their bank account...and then iván went back and recovered it from the security people at the park. my hero. 100,000 points. drink (café au lait for us, limonade for my mother, beer for my dad), dinner (pasta for the ladies, red meat for the men) with chilled (blech) red wine, ice cream at that gelato place in odéon (yummm, i had chocolate and mint that looked like a flower, but iván's was prettier and bigger), and then resting on a bench by l'institut de monde arabe.

pâtisserie and a huge gothic cathedral. plus a crazy québecer and a kiwi.

the bus granada-sevilla was...a bus, i bought a book of sudoku before leaving (which i quickly got bored of and dozed off). i sat next to this stylish blonde girl who was reading a spanish magazine with a small translating dictionary..."the client" was the movie of choice for the 3-hour ride, and it was subtitled in english (dubbed over in spanish), lucky for me...not a bad film, susan sarandon and that kid who probably didn't have a career after that movie, and that guy from ER who had cancer played the lawyer's assistant. oh yeah, and tommy lee jones in this hilarious role as a gospel-blabbing DA from louisiana. i was laughing, clearly an anglophone, and when i got out my printed out pdf to walk to oasis sevilla, the blonde girl asked me if i needed help getting there. or maybe she asked me if i was american, i can't remember the exact order of events...

needless to say, she took me on a long-ish walking tour of the city! she is german, from munich, a primary school teacher by trade, in sevilla for some months to learn spanish as well as assist in a primary school to teach kids german. it was about 25ºC when we arrived in sevilla, and she said that i had completely lucked out, that before she left for granada for a week's vacation it had been rainy and not-nice. she showed me some of the major sights and gave me scraps of history...the university, the cathedral, alcázares...it was sunny, warm, not many people on the streets, and i really got a feeling of the city. it looks big in the let's go guidebook, but it's not actually all that spread out.

she was incredibly kind, like lili said later, a kind of guardian angel. i found the hostel quite easily, she pointed me in the direction of the best pâtisserie in sevilla (yum, as i would find out later) and told me to turn the corner. an amazing start to a short venture in sevilla (and the last phase of my trip)!

i checked in to oasis, which i thought at first was closed for construction but they were just working on a building next door, and talked for a while with the swiss guy working there, he thought i was from québec (yes, jonathan, at first i was a bit miffed. i don't have a québecois accent, do i?). basta. i took my stuff up in the elevator to the 2nd floor (also room 6) and unlocked the door to find shirtless jonathan from montréal checking his email on his laptop! (not a girls' only room, i quickly concluded) we chatted for a while and we went down to meet a bunch of oasis-ers for a tapas and flamenco tour (one of the apparently regular nightly events that happen at these oasis hostels. heads up to anyone traveling in portugal - there's an oasis lisbon!).

on the walk i met a couple of australians and a lovely double bass player from milan named alessandra (goes by ale, who i hope has not dropped off the face of the earth). i ate some delicious beef stew and a chickpea dish at the first place and then had chicken curry and a big glass of sangria (mysteriously, my glass kept refilling) at the last place. we got to the flamenco place (la carbonería) a bit too late and were only able to catch their last set. it was a trio of performers: a female dancer, a guitarist, and a male singer. the dancer was tall, intimidating, and had an amazing dress that worked well with her passionate stomping and shadowed brow. the singer had a jaw/facial hair issue - he basically just looked crazy when he sang. he had a rough, gritty voice, that went well with the guitarist's articulations. (correct me here, o michael beharie and justin riberio, for i know not how to explain flamenco guitar)

after sticking around for ale to finish her beer, we tried not to get lost on the way back to the hostel (the streets were deserted at 1 am - strange for spain, as everyone seems to stay out til 6 or 7 am) and crashed. i rose early-ish to get some breakfast in the kitchen upstairs (waffles, toast, delicious chocolate spread, and milk) and also to get ale's contact info (although she rolled out an hour later than anticipated). we experienced a blackout from the waffle iron, although we thought at first it was the coffeemaker. i also met sydnah that morning, who is originally from queens, went to morgan state (pretty local to me), and is currently teaching english à la darcy in a suburb of paris. hopefully we'll prendre un verre demain.

i returned to my room to check out my map and guidebook to lay out a plan for my day and got into a conversation with a rather pasty irish guy who was still in bed in pjs. after having traveled for over a month, this guy was apparently so horny he even went so far as to proposition me right there, in a pretty decent hostel, while i am clearly not drunk enough to consider it nor forward enough to slap him in his half-wakeful state. puke. i bounced as soon as i had a vague sense of trajectory.

i walked around for a bit in town before seeing the massive queue for the cathedral, and i hoped (and was right) that most of the human traffic was due to tour groups. the line moved pretty quickly and despite my lack of student id card (i had locked my wallet in my safe back at oasis) the lady gave me the student priced-ticket. the cathedral was IMMENSE, people, just absurd. i read that it's the 3rd largest cathedral in the world, and the largest gothic cathedral. i have a certain disdain for christian iconography at this point, but this was just impressive. i didn't even bother to listen in on tour groups as i did in alhambra. they had beautiful orange trees in the garden outside.

i was dismayed that alcázares was closed on monday, but i got over it quickly because i had seen alhambra. i tried to find these beautiful gardens down my placa españa that sharonne had gushed about after eating a greasy sandwich and an ice cream from a random place near universitad...i found them eventually. parc de maría luisa. gorgeous. i wrote a postcard to clio there, which i ended up writing too much on and had to wait to get back to france to send it because i had no room to put 2 spanish stamps. i like traveling by myself a little bit because i can find my own chemin, sans souci pour les autres, and be totally in control of my situation. if i make a mistake, it's mine, and if i take time somewhere, it's mine to take. selfish, maybe, but i love it.

i walked down by the river (it must have been 28º or 30ºC) and ignored the one weird guy who tried to talk to me (i don't speak spanish anyway), eventually making my way back up to casa sierpes, a big shopping street not far from the hostel. i looked for shoes (on the prowl for sandals), but no dice. i bought breakfast food at a supermarket (pear yogurt, muesli bars, orange juice) as my flight was leaving at 7h45 the following morning for paris. i located the celebrated pâtisserie and bought 2 pastries, one that looked like a pain au chocolat (to save for the morning) and one that looked deadly and delicious that must have been filled with chocolate mousse. i took everything back to the hostel and ate a pear yogurt and the mousse pastry while recounting to one of the aussies i had met on the tapas tour the story of the horny irishman. blech. who does that?

i was sun-scorched and exhausted by that point, so i crashed for 30 or 40 minutes before meeting 3 washington&lee guys (all shirtless, wearing jeans, having just arrived in spain from the states that day). jonathan was on his computer and told us about the va tech shooting. too strange, especially for these guys who had just arrived from virginia for their study abroad...

monday was paella/sangria night, where everyone ate out on the roof (there is also a small pool) for 5€. ching-min (taiwanese flutist living in paris studying at the école normale) and i talked shop for a while, and i chatted with lili, this totally awesome kiwi teaching at a liberal primary school in zurich. it was a peaceful, humbling end to my amazingly awesome trip.

then it was back to paris early early and the rer back from orly to a less mediterranean parisian view of notre dame with machaut motet nº17 on my mind...

alhambra (for real).

(n.b. i am loosely translating from my let's go espagne book as well as commenting on my own experiences at alhambra in this post)

sharonne and i started with the palacios nazaríes (named for the nasrid dynasty, founded by al-ahmar in 1236 after he fled cordoba and took refuge at al-cazaba [Ar. fortress]), now known as alcázar (royal palace), built by 2 major moorish kings, yusuf I (1333-54) and son fils mohammed V (1354-91). i can't even articulate how amazing it was to be face-to-face with the kufic and cursive epigraphy that we had seen photos of in my islamic architecture class...sharonne has very little background in islam (or architecture), so i was able to point out some of the major elements, though some of the terminology escaped me. i took some photos, but sharonne took the bulk of them as my battery in my camera was running dangerously low, but not even the resolution of a digital camera can capture every dimension of the brilliant stucco work.

we also saw the palacio de carlos V (palace of charles quint), which was actually constructed by pedro machuca, a student of michelangelo. it is considered to be on of the most beautiful edifices of the spanish renaissance, with 2 floors of doric columns. sharonne saw it as a symbol of the blatant decadence of the époque (it is huge and circular, empty, and all in marble, and charles quint didn't even live there), but i think in many ways it fits with the idea that monarchs wanted to perpetuate their memory (and maybe create enormous empty spaces to demonstrate their wealth and power).

the views of granada and the sierra nevadas from the watchtower of alcazaba were incredible. it is said that al-quiada thought about bombing alhambra because it was the last muslim stronghold. the bells were rung (back in the 13th century) to announce imminent danger and also to signal different stages of the irrigation system set in place by the moors.

i know this is a big sin, but i didn't see generalife (the gardens at alhambra). i was tired, starving for some shawarma (the veiled lady at picadilly circus also gave me free falafel on my last afternoon! i think she liked my henna), and my bus left granada for sevilla at 4:30 that afternoon...